I'm thankful that TakaraTomy announced their plans for Misfire and Slugslinger before Hasbro's versions were available. I didn't have such luck with Triggerhappy, who I ended up needing to rebuy. TakaraTomy's versions come with their Targetmaster partners, see, and in Misfire's case, his is the most important Decepticon Targetmaster of all, to me, because of a terribly-presented scene in the original cartoon that had endeared itself to me.

Aimless, introducing himself:"I live only to destroy our mutual enemies!"

Misfire:"I think the name Aimless suits you better!"

Which, as presented, sounds like Aimless is saying his name is "Lives Only To Destroy Our Mutual Enemies," or at least Misfire believes so.

Regardless, Aimless is the best Targetmaster, and obviously if there's a proper new toy of that guy, I want it. And so I passed on the American version and waited patiently for the Japanese version.

Misfire has Triggerhappy's legs, but everything from the crotch up is essentially new. Sure, he keeps the same fists, biceps, and shoulder joints, but the rest of the arms and torso -- and essentially 90% of the toy's transformation -- is original. Mind, Triggerhappy's best feature, the swoosh-swap-spin torso magic in the transformation to jet mode, is gone, so Misfire isn't going to be exactly as cool. However, Misfire has a few small tricks of his own that make him stand out. It takes a fairly straightforward transformation trope, flipping the nose of the vehicle back and pulling up the arms, and adds enough little levers and hinges to make it interesting. Essentially, the arms and wings rotate and push up to the top of the torso while maintaining their vertical orientation. It's neat and is entirely cosmetic.

The original Misfire toy was content to fold the nosecone straight back, hanging down over his butt. The cartoon/comic model, however, had the double-pronged nose of the jet poke up over the backs of his shoulders. This gives Misfire an interesting and unique silhouette. This new toy happily recreates this, double-hinging the nosecone piece so it can stay pointing up rather than pointing down.

This new toy also gives Misfire his cartoon model's head, which has goggles and no antenna, rather than the original toy's singular eyes and pointy ears. This matches the Marvel comics, the American cartoon, and the Headmasters anime, but it doesn't match the more toy-accurate design Misfire was given in the IDW comics, where he's a popular character in the MTMTE/Lost Light series. Thanks to the head-swapping gimmick of the toyline, though, you can get a pretty good approximation of his IDW/toy head by substituting in Titan Master Ptero (Swoop).

The toy is a crazy magenta pink that I adore. The bright blue of Aimeless and the jet's cockpit window contrasts it perfectly. He's a pretty fuckin' toy.

I haven't seen the American one in person, so I can't tell you how pretty his pink is.

I'm not sure I could sell him any better than that, and I'm wondering if I should just stop with that one sentence and call it a day.

*sigh* FIIINE I guess I'll ruin everything and actually talk about his toy.

Power of the Primes Dreadwind is unique among the first wave of Deluxe Class guys because he's just a retool of Combiner Wars Skydive. Other than the technicality of Jazz's combiner peg (Dragstrip's), everyone else is all new! I mean, Dreadwind's retooled a lot, but he's still got the legs and large parts of the jet still left over.

His transformation is different in one way -- his wings fold down onto his legs instead of staying on his back. You might think this is weird because, like, Dreadwind's first toy's wings were on his back, so why retool him to make him less like himself? The answer is that -- also like the first toy -- Dreadwind can combine with Darkwing (wave 2) to form a huger superjet, and those wings of his fold down to his legs to help facilitate a better combined jet mode.

In robot mode, those giant wings on his legs are... cumbersome. They are quite large. I will give that they make standing him up amazingly stable, but they're kinda an eyesore. They're less so when photographed from head on, like he is above, but believe me, it's worse in 3D.

Another important non-cosmetic change is that his mid-chest combiner port plug has a little flip-up bit that flips down to reveal a 5mm peghole. This is how you attach his combiner fist to his torso as chest armor. If you decide you want to do that and stick Prime Masters in him, anyway.

Dreadwind's a great character, and this is an okayish toy of him that's much like an earlier toy that was redecoed/retooled a dozen times already, but now it's retooled in a way that's kind of dorky so that you can do something cool with him later when the next wave comes out.

Here's where the Power of the Primes stuff starts to get a little messy.

Okay, so, like, there's these Thirteen Original Primes. Some of them have gotten toys before, like Megatronus (The Fallen) and Vector Prime and Alpha Trion. Most of them haven't! But they're getting toys now!

Sort of!

See, they're being represented in toy form as... random Pretenders characters from 1988. For example, in this case, this toy that for all the world that looks like Pretender Cloudburst has "Micronus" written on the package, and this is a toy of Micronus wearing a "Cloudburst decoy suit" or something like that, maybe. I can't remember if that's just HasCon presentation slide stuff or if any of that Cloudburst stuff made it to the packaging proper. I'm too lazy to grab the instructions off the floor.

Why is Cloudburst actually Micronus? I dunno. Micronus is, well, the Mini-Con member of the Thirteen. Cloudburst doesn't really have anything about him that would suggest he'd be an appropriate repurposing for Micronus.

I dunno what's going on here.

The play pattern idea is, however, that you take the little Prime Master robot guy out of the "decoy suit" or whatever, and you fold him up into his altmode, which is a chunk of plastic with a Micronus symbol on it, and you plug him into another Power of the Primes toy and pretend that grants the other toy a certain powerset. Micronus's powerset seems to be related to "Power-linking," or in plain English: sharing. If you plug Micronus into Swoop, for example, it's said that Swoop can gift other Transformers the power of flight. Throw your Jazz up into the air and see what happens.... in your imaaaaaaaaaaagination!

The "decoy suit" transforms into a double-barreled gun for other Transformers to wield. Also, the gun barrels can pop off the back of the "decoy suit" and be pegged into the fisthole of the "decoy suit" to be used as a weapon.

It's a little more fun than it sounds, but Micronus/Cloudburst is just a bad example. Now, Liege Maximo, whose powerset is "be Marvel's Loki," and Vector Prime, whose powerset is "time travel"... those offer some more interesting playtime possibilities.

I mean, would you rather transform into a Sharing Gun or a... TIME GUN?

This may feel abbreviated because I wrote a really long and verbose review of this toy the other night, but my website ate it, and I don't have it in me to write about this toy and its bullshit twice. So.

Let's just get this part out of the way: Power of the Primes Jazz's deco artist hid the acronym "MAGA" in super-tiny Cybertronian-language characters on both of his doors, and then whichever Hasbro employee was in charge of this freelance person didn't catch it, but one of us nerds spotted it and translated it, and everyone was all "whoa yikes" and Hasbro had to release a public statement because some jag tampographed a white nationalist slogan on their black guy Transformer character.

Before this discovery, this toy to me was kind of boring. And once I woke up last week to this news, it was suddenly the wrong kind of interesting.

Let's face it, this toy had a lot to live up to. The last toy of G1 Jazz was the 2010 Reveal the Shield toy, and that is one of those rare Perfect Transformers. And after seven years of budget shrinkage and rising production costs, it is impossible to create something that perfect again at the same pricepoint -- and even if you did, it'd just be the RTS toy again.

I mean, this isn't a terrible Jazz. It's an aggressively okay Jazz. It's just not a perfect Jazz. But the one thing it has going for it is that it can become an arm or a leg for a combiner. It's true, RTS Jazz couldn't do that. And it's not a small thing for a toy to do. (Admittedly, another thing that RTS Jazz can't do is be on shelves right now in 2017, so that's another point to PotP Jazz.)

Like the other Deluxe Class toys from this toyline, Jazz's combiner fist is also chest armor for the robot mode. However, it fits on his chest only awkwardly, if I'm following the very scant instructions right. There's just a drawing of the fist/armor piece and Jazz with an arrow, the end. I thiiiiink you're supposed to gently nudge those thumb tabs into the seemingly-corresponding slots on his fender. But it's not a great, secure fit.

In summary: This is the best available Jazz to you currently, but it's definitely not the best Jazz possible. But it can be a combiner limb, if that's cool. Also, maybe you might want to wait until he's repacked for Wave 3, since the MAGA might be gone by then, or see what the hell TakaraTomy does with him.

There's a new Dinobot in town, and she's a velociraptor! Say hello to Slash, the second female Dinobot (the first, Strafe, is part of the team in IDW comics right now), but the first female Dinobot with a toy.

And you know what, I'm going to lay it all right here now. I love this toy. It's tiny, it's just complex enough to be interesting but simple enough you can fiddle with it back and forth, and it transforms from a robot to a velociraptor. A Jurassic Park-style non-feathery velociraptor, but whatcha gonna do. The other Dinobots are kind of stuck in the 80s, so Slash being stuck in the 90s is still some kind of temporal improvement.

Slash transforms essentially like Beast Wars Dinobot. While the head folds inside the torso instead of forming the chest like Dinobot, the rest is pretty familiar. Her robot legs fold up underneath the beast mode torso, the robot arms become the beast mode legs, and the tail folds out from behind her. (But it does not become a rotate blade weapon.)

With her red torso, black head, legs, and fists, and silver everything else, she fits in really well with the aesthetic of the rest of the Dinobot team. The Dinobots desperately need a velociraptor anyway.

You can open a compartment in her beast mode back to fit a Prime Master or Titan Master. The Prime Master trading card she comes with is supposed to be multingual, but no matter which of the 12 random cards you receive, they're all going to be entirely English. The same English phrases repeated four times. Because I guess somebody didn't bother to translate the last three into Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Whoops.

Even if you don't get the rest of this line's Dinobots, I highly recommend Slash. She's by far the best toy in this wave of Legends, and she's just fun to transform back and forth, each mode being a happy destination.

And nothing's covertly written on her in cybertronix by some jag who's probably not freelancing for Hasbro anymore.